Pressure for free trade is growing in Africa. The European Union is urging African governments to sign economic partnership agreements (EPAs) and end non-reciprocal trade preferences: to keep their exports to the EU exempt from customs duties, African countries will have to remove 80% of those they apply to imports from the EU. The African Union (AU) has started negotiations to establish a huge continental free trade area (CFTA), and a meeting of trade ministers in Niger on 16 June decided to work towards the removal of 90% of duties between African countries.

This rush towards free trade is questionable, especially for the agricultural sector. West Africa faces a triple challenge: a growing food deficit, a population explosion and climate change. The food deficit grew from an average €144m in 2000-4 to €2.1bn in 2013-6, but if cocoa (not a basic food product) is excluded, it has soared from €2.5bn to €7.5bn. It is likely to worsen, since the population is expected to double by 2050, and the UN believes that a temperature rise of 2°C could reduce agricultural yields in sub-Saharan Africa by 10%. The EPAs the EU wants would reduce customs duties to zero, over five years, on basic food products such as cereals (apart from rice) and powdered milk. This would not only sharply increase West Africa’s food dependency, but ruin its dairy farmers and growers of local cereals (millet, sorghum, maize) and other starch-rich crops (cassava, yams, plantains).

The European Commission presents the EPAs as ‘win-win’ agreements, but the majority of African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries have refused to sign them formally, though they originally declared their intention to sign by initialling them. Nigeria accounted for 72% of West Africa’s GDP and 52% of its population in 2016, and President Muhammadu Buhari told the European Parliament in February 2016 that the regional EPA would destroy his country’s industrialisation programme. In East Africa, the (...)